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Posts Tagged ‘raconteur games’

As mentioned in prior posts, this is my first ever game jam that I’ve participated in! I’ve organized two, but never participated — and now that changes!

Building The Tomb has been a refreshing challenge in containing scope, which puts all those production skills I claim to have to the test. 😉

We’ve already had to cut down a few ideas such that we would have more time for testing and implementation; scope is a funny thing, but especially in such a short time.

Here’s a brief look at where we are right now, with a more in-depth final post coming tomorrow morning after we wrap the project up for submission!

This is a weird smorgasbord of our animation, characters, UI, dialogue system, and key room environment all in one place!

We’ve also got sound FX and UI sourced via Creative Commons 0 files (so no audio category for us in judging, regrettably!), and all scenes are set up. Now we’re doing final implementation and jumping into polishing and testing!

Tomorrow, we’ll have way more context on what this strange idea is, as well as an in-depth look at the entire experience.

Welcome back for update #2 on The Tomb, a strange little game about a cult of people that build their own tombs!

Here’s our first look at the game itself.

Meet Sam! She’s an upbeat young woman who has lived her whole life in this cult. To her, death embodies every day, every decision, every divergence in routine. As other NPCs will charmingly remind her, “Death comes for us all!”

A primary mechanic of the game centers on meeting and speaking with other characters to flesh out social skills. By interacting with the world in this way, the player learns more, forms stronger relationships, and ultimately will reveal more about the entire setting apart from just digging their own grave. (What a fun sentence to type!)

Right now, we’re working on getting the systems in place in order to have the other NPCs populate the world and be able to perform their charming dialogue and relationship building with Sam.

Here’s an image of the room becoming more populated! Rainy skies are visible through the windows, Sam is asleep (because while we are pursuing the long nap, all shorter naps are certainly welcome!), and another character – the Grocer – is coming to drop off something for Sam’s family.

More updates are coming soon — next time, we’ll go more into the systems and actual gameplay of the world itself. This is a blast, and I think we’re creating a really neat concept!

We saw the theme of “one room” and wanted to give it a fun narrative spin, and what we came up with was delightfully strange and grotesquely beautiful. In this game, a death-obsessed cult spends their entire life focused on death, and a major part of that is building your own tomb.

So, you are literally digging your own grave!

Dark, right? Nah, these are silly cultists who end conversations with quips like, “Death comes for us all!” It really is a charming little thing, I promise you!

Sander is currently knee-deep in code for custom systems based on social interaction with characters, which can determine how certain relationships in the game play out. Charity is working on great art for the game — first screenshot in our next post!

Excited for this to be my first game jam game, as well as being able to collaborate with other Louisiana developers.